Institutions Tout Role In Area Economy

Economic impact is a phrase that, Harvey Drucker understands, can be an especially challenging discussion topic, particularly at 7:30 on a gray, winter morning.

So Drucker, associate lab director at Argonne National Laboratory near Lemont and one of the early speakers at a recent forum on the economic impact of area institutions, decided to reach for some tangible references: french fries and Wal-Mart.

He pointed out that the fry baskets in 13,000 McDonald's restaurants were taken from a design made at Argonne; and that a firm that manufactured refrigerators for Wal-Mart used Argonne expertise to stabilize a rubber coating on refrigerator racks, saving a large contract in the process.

Other institution administrators came up with their own quirky references to economic impact.

Brookfield Zoo Director George Rabb noted that the zoo sold enough hot dogs a year--24 tons--to line a path between Brookfield and Fermilab in Batavia, and enough rubber snakes to stretch the 30 miles between the zoo and Aurora.

Curious comparisons notwithstanding, the underlying message was that the four institutions represented at the forum--Argonne National Laboratory, Brookfield Zoo, Fermilab and Northern Illinois University in DeKalb--are economic powerhouses. A few examples:

Last year, Fermilab spent in northeast Illinois about $68 million for goods and services, nearly $20 million for electricity and about $125 million for salaries and benefits to its employees, 98 percent of whom live in northeast Illinois.

Brookfield Zoo has an operating budget of $43 million, employs 450 people full time, 125 part time and nearly 600 seasonal workers. The zoo has more than 4,300 vendor accounts, to which $43 million is dispersed every year.

"We have a very large, very complex economic system in northern Illinois," NIU President John La Tourette told the group of about 90 people in a Fermilab lecture hall last week.

The East-West Corporate Corridor Association presented the seminar at Fermilab for people to "learn about the business side of these research and academic institutions," according to the association's flier on the seminar. "We have unknown treasures right here in our back yard," it stated.

And, all the administrators offered waves of numbers to show economic impact but they also broadened the topic.

More than 2.2 million people visited Brookfield Zoo last year, and out-of-town tourists contributed $25 million to the local economy, Rabb said.

After running through their economic numbers, representatives from the national laboratories spoke in perhaps the most conceptual terms.

Fermilab Director John Peoples Jr. suggested that the most exciting element to physics' economic potential may be in its unknown possibilities.

The World Wide Web, for example, began as a way for physicists around the globe to communicate their research results.

"The things that we do, even when they become extraordinarily practical, we have no idea that they will," he said.

Drucker was enthusiastic about Argonne's Advanced Photon Source, the nation's most powerful tool to break down and analyze human structure. Analysis of that material that used to run for months and years now can be done in a day, he said.

Such advancements led to the development of a drug to block the development of a protein in AIDS, Drucker added.

"We're just at the base of our knowledge to do this," he said, "and it's just going to go straight up."